Soldiers celebrate before leaving for Afghanistan

Andy Kravetz

Saturday

Aug 23, 2008 at 12:01 AMAug 23, 2008 at 10:03 PM

Pride. Honor. Courage. Those were some of the words tossed around Friday afternoon as some 300 people gathered at the Joint Reserve Training Facility in Bartonville to send off 90 or so soldiers with Company A, 1st Battalion, 178th Infantry Regiment, which heads to Fort Bragg, N.C., in a few days for their final training before shipping out to Afghanistan.

Pride. Honor. Courage.

Those were some of the words tossed around Friday afternoon as some 300 people gathered at the Joint Reserve Training Facility in Bartonville to send off 90 or so soldiers with Company A, 1st Battalion, 178th Infantry Regiment, which heads to Fort Bragg, N.C., in a few days for their final training before shipping out to Afghanistan.

Bethany Pannell, of Colorado Springs, Colo., was there for her brother, Spc. Carl Dunn of Lacon. She’s been through this before as her husband, Staff Sgt. Charles Pannell, is in Iraq now. Dunn’s other sister, Amanda Dunn of Peoria, was there as well. Both women were proud and hopeful about their brother’s choice to enlist. It was his first time going overseas so they were naturally worried.

Rock music blared as family members milled about before the start of the ceremony. Their soldiers, either husbands, sons, brothers or boyfriends, chatted nearby on a football field as they got ready to march in.

The Bartonville-based soldiers will not go as their own unit, but rather fill in where needed in the regiment’s three other infantry companies. All are part of the 33rd Brigade Combat Team, which was notified last year it would be headed to Afghanistan.

The deployment is among the largest since World War II, with some 2,700 soldiers taking part. For months, the 33rd BCT has been involved in lengthy training exercises in Illinois and Arkansas to get ready. Once in Afghanistan, the soldiers will be part of Task Force Phoenix, an ongoing effort in its sixth reincarnation, to train Afghan security forces.

Speakers from a major general to colonel to the company’s captain praised the soldiers, noting their deployment was different than previous wars. This time, they were volunteers. They had the choice to enlist and made it, not because they had to but because they wanted to.